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The slow destruction of ‘the immediacy of the written word’ as technology develops

In consider what generative AI means for humanism, I’ve found myself getting preoccupied by the continuities which are obscured by an epochal narrative of disruptive innovation. Far from heralding an entirely new world with new rules, the dramatic expansion of automated capacities highlights processes which were already underway; to understand that processes can help us understand the present moment and vice versa.

One of these is breaking the link between human creativity and cultural output. In reality there have been automated and procedural supplements to writing for centuries. What’s new is not the procedural element but rather the versatility, availability and sophistication of it. In reality there have been cultural outputs produced for purposes other than to express human creativity for centuries, particularly since the rise of the cultural industries. What’s new is not the non-human aspects of this process but rather the fact an individual can now initiate this process and watch it take place.

I found this thought provoking in Christian Emden’s Neitzsche on Language, Consciousness and the Body pg 29. I’ve added the bold to underscore the connection to my points above:

Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter is more than just a curious
anecdote from a philosopher’s life or a bizarre footnote to the history of modern media. Rather, it signals a crucial change in the cultural consciousness of the later nineteenth century, and Nietzsche himself realized the effect of this machine on his own writing (KGB III/1, p. 172). The assumed immediacy of the written word—seemingly connected in a direct way to the thoughts and ideas of the author through the physical movement of the hand—was displaced by the flow of disconnected letters on the page, one as standardized as the other. The presumed individuality of handwriting gave way to a new “atomism” of language that surpassed the “atomism” of speech Nietzsche encountered in his studies on rhythm and on Democritus. This new, mechanically generated “atomism” of language, produced here through Nietzsche’s typewriter, reflected the cultural effects of technology and the reorientation of the modern episteme in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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